Steven E. Wedel's Blog, page 40

We’ll never be as young as we are right now

If you didn't already know it, I'm a big fan of Jim Steinman. The man is just brilliant. And he's a snazzy dresser. In my (not so) humble opinion, Steinman has written some of the best songs of the 20th century. Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, even Kiss can't compete with Steinman, the mastermind who penned the songs on Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell, released in 1977. As C.S. Lewis would put it, Steinman's music has a "northness" to it, a Wagnerian Nordic feel that makes you think of Viking ships, Valkyries, unrequited love, and heroic death scenes. You probably know about Bat Out of Hell, and probably even Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell. He also released his own album, Bad for Good, in 1980, and wrote the song's for Meat Loaf's mostly overlooked gem, Dead Ringer, that came out in 1981. He put together a girl band called Pandora's Box that released the original version of his mega-hit "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" somewhere back there in the '80s, too. He's a genius.

But this isn't really about Jim Steinman, per se. I only mention him because he doesn't get enough credit. What this is really about is how my wife and I finally – after a few decades of waiting – got to see Meat Loaf perform live this past Saturday night in Newkirk, Oklahoma. We were both fans before we met, which means we were singing along with Meat before 1980, when we were in our very early teens. Seeing Meat Loaf was always one of those lofty goals, one we never really thought we'd achieve, because the man just doesn't come to Oklahoma and we've never been able to jetset to NYC or even Denver just to catch his show. So, when we learned he was playing two casinos in Okieland, going was a no-brainer.

Short of playing all night, the show was everything I could have hoped for. I mean, there were so many more songs I would have liked to have heard, but, you know, otherwise it was great. He played several songs off the first Bat and some off Bat II. He ignored Dead Ringer, Bad Attitude, Welcome to the Neighborhood, and Bat III, playing three off the (fairly) new Hang Loose Teddy Bear, and opening with "Hot Patootie" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The man is a hell of an entertainer. The casino's hall appeared to be pretty well filled to its 1,400 capacity. We were toward the back, but still close enough to see the gleam in Meat's eye as he sang to the crowd. He seemed to be enjoying it as much as we were. He sang, he told stories, he made jokes, he shot T-shirts from a weenie gun he swore was an exact replica of his penis, and he sang some more.

The icing on the cake? His female duet partner wasn't a "stranger" he picked up for the[image error] tour. It was none other than Patti Russo. She has an absolutely amazing voice and really contributed to the show.

How does this show rate? Musically, it was one of the best I've seen. He doesn't bring the pyrotechnics of Kiss or the volume of AC/DC, but song for song he put on one of the best shows I've seen.

We'll never be as young as we are right now

If you didn't already know it, I'm a big fan of Jim Steinman. The man is just brilliant. And he's a snazzy dresser. In my (not so) humble opinion, Steinman has written some of the best songs of the 20th century. Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, even Kiss can't compete with Steinman, the mastermind who penned the songs on Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell, released in 1977. As C.S. Lewis would put it, Steinman's music has a "northness" to it, a Wagnerian Nordic feel that makes you think of Viking ships...

Bullies

Technorati Tags: carrie jones,harperteen,megan kelly hall,r.l. stine,ellen hopkins,bully,bullying,bullies,anthology,book news Several months ago I was asked by Carrie Jones to write an essay for an anthology she was editing with Megan Kelly Hall. The book was to be a collection of essays by authors discussing bullies. I thought it was a nice gesture for Carrie to invite me to submit, and I kind of felt sorry that she'd have to send me a rejection letter somewhere down the road.

I wrote about an early experience I had with a bully named Kevin. I was in the second grade at the time, and in my essay I touched on how that experience affected me for many years after. Unlike most essays I write, I spent a fair amount of time on this one, trying to pull off a bit of literary time travel.

Well, Carrie didn't reject it. In fact, the essay somehow survived the cut of hundreds of submissions and made the table of contents. It is one of 70 such essays you'll soon be able to read in Dear Bully, due out August 23 from HarperTeen. Here's a link where you can get more information.

Want to see a picture of the cover? Sure you do! It's a nice cover. If you look closely you can read the names of most of the authors. I'm so blown away to be included with the likes of R.L. Stine and Ellen Hopkins, among so many others.

If you want, you can already pre-order the book from your favorite retailer. Here's an Amazon.com link. Proceeds from the sales go to help those affected by bullying.

This one meant even more than usual this year because many of my best current and some past students worked through Upward Bound last summer to form Stand for the Silent, a group dedicated to putting an end to bullying. The book and the group aren't connected, other than sharing the same goal, but it was serendipitous that the two things would happen at the same time, I think.

I hope you'll consider buying the book and helping the cause. I know I'm looking forward to reading those other 69 essays.

Bullies

Several months ago I was asked by Carrie Jones to write an essay for an anthology she was editing with Megan Kelly Hall. The book was to be a collection of essays by authors discussing bullies. I thought it was a nice gesture for Carrie to invite me to submit, and I kind of felt sorry that she'd have to send me a rejection letter somewhere down the road.

I wrote about an early experience I had with a bully named Kevin. I was in the second grade at the time, and in my essay I touched on how...

How things have changed

Over the past couple of months my writing time has been spent in ways totally alien to me before meeting and writing a book with Carrie Jones in 2008. I've learned a lot about working with a legitimate agent and a major publishing house, and about writing for young adults. I thought I'd share a bit of what I've learned recently.

In the adult market served by small press genre publishers, pretty much anything goes in regards to content. That's how I ended up with a possessed penis trying to rape an infant in Seven Days in Benevolence. In young adult fiction, you have to consider that the kids might go for such a scene, but the book has to get through gatekeepers … parents, librarians, teachers, etc. So, racial slurs have to be kept to a minimum (much less common than in a real life inner city high school). Editors want you to use politically correct terms, like Native American instead of Indian. Sex can happen, but in an off-the-page kind of way. And even demons have limits on the amount of cursing they can do.

With a major publisher, acceptance of a work doesn't mean you're finished with the writing. On the contrary, the hardest writing you'll do comes after the acceptance and before the copy edits, as editors actually study what you've written in minute detail and point out how this scene could flow better, how this one really only repeats earlier information, and various other things you, the author, probably never thought about. In the small press, no editor has ever asked me to rewrite a single page after the book was accepted and the contract signed. With the exception of a few short stories, no small press editor has ever asked me change anything, which means Shara, Ulrik, and the others only had the benefit of my critique group's input.

Here's how copy edits work with my small press books: I'm sent a PDF of what the publisher is going to send to the printer. The PDF is always very, very close to what I originally sent to the publisher. I read through the PDF and make notes of any mistakes I find, sending my notes to the publisher when I'm done. The publisher makes those changes and sends the book to press. Major publishers have people who are experts at copyediting. I mean, I thought I was pretty good at it, but the copy editors at Bloomsbury found mistakes I'd looked blindly at more times than I want to think about.

Before hooking up with Carrie I spent as much time pounding the virtual pavement of the Internet studying markets and trying to place my fiction with publishers as I did actually writing. Now that I have a big-time agent, I can send my work to him and he'll tell me how I can make it more appealing to editors who pay lots of money. Then he'll do the selling. (Well, okay, I'm still in the process of incorporating his suggestions into the first solo book I've sent him, but presumably he'll take on the job of selling it once I'm finished.)

It's been a fun ride so far, and I hope it just keeps getting better. I can't thank Carrie, Edward, Michelle, and Margaret enough for the changes in my career.

One last change I have to mention … My 16-year-old daughter is now a licensed driver. I've barely seen her since she got that piece of plastic. If you happen to be driving on the south side of the OKC metro and see a red Ford Focus driven by a grinning blonde, please give my little girl lots of space so she'll make it home safely.

The flora of home

The other day, quite by accident, I was able to put a semi-familiar word with a very familiar object. Hydrangea. I knew the name from books, but, as with most plant life, I didn't know what a hydrangea bush looked like. Well, that's what I thought. Turned out I knew exactly what one looked like because we had one beside the porch of the house where I grew up in Enid. We just called in the snowball bush. There's a picture of one here, just in case you share my previous ignorance.

I have some pretty fond memories of that shrub. When we were young – early grade school – my sister Lisa and I and neighbor kids would sometimes play house on the porch and those nice white flowers would play the role of crops we harvested for food. (We didn't really eat them.) Of course, being a boy, I'd also dig holes, build twig bridges, and smooth out roads in the dirt around the bush.

No meal would be complete with only one dish. The most common thing served with our white hydrangea flowers were the pink flowers and dark seeds (subbing for beans) of the mimosa tree from [image error]the back yard. Now that was a tree full of memories! The tree had split about two feet from the ground and grew in three separate directions. The tallest of these had a nice three-pronged saddle maybe 10 feet off the ground. From that saddle we could see the Broadway Tower in the downtown area. My dad would never let me build a tree house in that tree, but me and my friends used it a lot, mostly in war games, for shade over my canvas tent, or shade when we were target practicing with my bow or Red Ryder BB gun. Sadly, the tree died at some point after I left home and it had to be removed. Even more sad is that Lisa and I were responsible for killing it because we stripped the bark off one of those spokes as kids.

We had a tall elm tree when we moved into the house, but the only thing I really remember about it was my dad and uncle and neighbor getting rid of it. Dad used his 1964 Ford truck to pull it down. It left a big crater in the back yard that was fun to play in … until Mom said the wet spots in the dirt were from raw sewage.

We had one other tree. A fraser fir that was pretty small when we moved in, but grew to be huge before Mom and Dad moved away about 10 years ago. It was a lot fatter than this Christmas tree version in the picture. One summer we had problems with a certain kind of bird attacking our golden retriever, a neighbor cat, and even my mom. The bird was pulling out hair to make its nest in the fir tree. Maybe you don't know it, but I have a bird phobia (thank you, Alfred Hitchcock). Well, one day I waited on the back porch until that bird came home from doing whatever it was doing (probably attacking more innocent mammals), and I capped it with the above-mentioned BB gun. Years later I learned that bird was a mockingbird, and I have to say I completely disagree with Atticus Finch on the value of that particular bird.

 

Today's trip down Memory Lane has been brought to you by Big Blue Pants. Covering fat yellow butts for 14 years, Big Blue Pants.

Old World Ponderings

Sometimes, on clear nights like tonight, I look up at the moon and stars and think about how people have looked up at the moon and stars for centuries before me, and how their lives were so different. Did ancient people question their place in the universe? Did they have doubts about their purpose here? Was such a concept even part of their vocabulary?

Today, archealogists scrabble through the dirt looking for pieces of pottery, broken tools, altars of worship, or anything else the ancients left behind. We want to know what they believed and how they lived. But why? Is it to show how far we've come? How progressive we are? Maybe. Or maybe we know that they knew things we have forgotten. Important things that we shouldn't have forgotten, but did, and we hope that if we find their artifacts there'll be some clue there in the dirt and we can rediscover what we've lost.

They looked up to a moon and stars and planets and comets and saw more than we did. There were no skyscrapers blocking their view. There was no light pollution hiding all but the brightest stars. Did you know that the planet we call Mars, named for the Roman god of war, which is an avatar for the Greek god of war, is the same star the ancient Mayans assigned to their god of war? How can it be that two civilizations an ocean apart could do that?

They lived closer to the land, our ancient ancestors. The earth was a living thing, usually a goddess, sometimes a god or giant or snake or the body of something older than the gods, even. To them, seasons were not determined by a time for sun bathing or snow tires. They lived with the earth, not simply on it, and to be able to name a thing was to have some magic over it. We have lost that magic, traded it for Internet and cell phones and giant chicken breasts that are more laboratory-produced hormones than meat.

Is it a good trade? Silly question as I sit in a climate-controlled house typing my silliness onto a laptop to publish it on a weird, invisible web where it will be read by people I don't even know.

Well, this will end my hippie talk for now. This concept is something I'm exploring in Nadia's Children, the next book of The Werewolf Saga, but I guess if you care you can read that ... if I ever finish it.

A few reviews and such

In an effort to get my "grade level" seniors to actually read a book, I'm breaking the classes into four groups of four to five kids and assigning each group a different novel. The novels are The Hobbit, Nineteen Eighty-four, and despite being an American author, My Sister's Keeper. The fourth book was going to be Frankenstein, but it's written on a 12th grade level, and is therefore too complicated for seniors. With Mary Shelly out, I went to Wuthering Heights, but that's written on an 11th grade level, and not a single kid was interested in Heathcliff and Catherine's tragic story. So I went and spent my own money on copies of Agatha Christy's Murder on the Orient Express. Hopefully that'll work. It's at a 5th grade reading level. I've never read a Christy book, and my usual source of lesson plans has nothing, but I think I can fake it.

My Sister's Keeper, on the other hand, is something I got through a grant intended for my Advanced Placement Literature students. I'd never read a Jodi Picoult novel, either, but went with this one on the advise of another teacher to replace Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, which the kids really, really hate. I've been reading My Sister's Keeper ... and I hate it! There are six point-of-view characters, and all of them are dealing with deep, emotional problems. The kid suing her parents does not think or talk like a kid. The mother is totally unbelievable. And the fireman's son being an arsonist is just soooo predictable. It's an easy enough read, but I have to force myself to pick it up. You probably know my thoughts on Twilight, and the kids love that, so I'm sure they'll eat this drivel up, too. In fact, I had to pass out the books to my AP classes to get pictures as part of my thank-you package to DonorsChoose.org. Afterward, I had to literally pull the books out of the hands of some of the girls who wanted to read it instead of The Grapes of Wrath. Picoult over Steinbeck? It's almost blasphemy.

In audiobooks, I recently finished listening to American Gods, which I loved. I then wanted to get another big epic novel, but couldn't find anything in the fantasy/horror genre on Audible.com. So I got Wallace Stegner's Big Rock Candy Mountain because it sounded a little like East of Eden. It's basically another chick book. Young girls marries violent, sometimes abusive, sometimes loving man who drags her and the kids all over the West, rubbing a kid's face in his own crap, smacking them around, gambling with their money, etc. I'm about 16 hours into it and it's boring.

When I bought those Christy books yesterday at Half Price Books I also picked up a copy of Terry C. Johnston's Carry the Wind in hopes it will be a manly read.

And finally, Kim and I went to see The Rite yesterday. I was a little nervous because of the bad reviews it was getting, but we both really liked it. It isn't as over-the-top as The Exorcist, but it has a pretty similar plot with a priest (or almost priest) who loses his faith and rediscovers it through a confrontation with a demon. It's a slow, quiet character study with some jump-scares and nice psychological drama. I definitely recommend it.

Literature of Hope

What is the worst thing you can make a 9th grader read? I would argue that it is William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. This isn't a knock on the Bard, or his play that has remained popular for hundreds of years. It's just that the ending isn't what teenagers want, and maybe it isn't what they need.

A few things have gotten me to thinking about this. Some of my fellow teachers have been talking about how nearly every long piece of fiction or drama that we teach is incredibly depressing. Add to that one of my students crying through class today, probably because her boyfriend broke up with her, and the fact Carrie Jones and I are working on an interview for Bloomsbury in which I have to talk about switching from adult fiction to young adult.

Young adults don't want to be depressed when they read. They have enough going on to mess them up. Raging hormones causing emotional extremes, dating, acne, dating, parental pressure, dating, peer pressure, dating, feeling like they have no control of their lives, suddenly having to take on a job with school to pay for a car and all that goes with that. Getting innto a good college and making sure that education is funded. Oh, and dating! Is it any wonder they are upset with the end of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, or when Romeo and Juliet kill themselves for love, or when Edna Pontellier walks off into the sea? How about this: "It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done." Sure, it's a happy ending for Lucy and Charles Darnay at the end of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, but poor old Sydney Carton goes face down in a basket.

Young adult literature, though, isn't depressing. Not usually. Often at the beginning of the story it seems the character should be depressed. Often she or he is living in a broken home, maybe with a drug-addicted parent, or a single parent wrapped up in dating, or whatever. But as the story progresses, no matter how bleak it seems to be for the kid, there is hope, and usually a happier ending than the reader is going to find in the accepted American or British literary canon we teach in school.

So, was it difficult to switch from adult horror fiction to young adult paranormal romance? Not really. Sure, I've learned that even demons have to watch their language in the YA world, but writing a novel where the good guys win -- really win -- and where young people overcome the evils assailing them, that was pretty good.

A few loose ends

Christmas break. Why does it have to end? Well, every year since I went to work as a teacher, the school has closed for multiple days during January because of the weather. There's nothing bad in the forecast yet, but I have hope I'll get another break soon. haha

So, I got a call from Nanci at Horror World a couple of weeks ago. She's buying my short story "New Moon" for publication at HW at some point during 2011. I'd forgotten she asked for some stories to look at some time back. I sent her at least two, and she actually preferred "Scream of Humanity", but since I published it with Amazon's Kindle program it was eliminated. I'll let you know when "New Moon" is up.

Speaking of Amazon's Kindle, I got my first notice of payment for the two e-books I've published through that program. Not much money, but it's nice that they're paying. I never got any money from the Amazon Shorts program they had. The sad thing is that as small as the payment is, it's still more than I've ever gotten for the Fine Tooth Press publication of Darkscapes. I'll be parting out more of those stories for the Kindle program this year.

Also, Carrie Jones let me know that an essay I wrote will be included in Dear Bully, an anthology of essays by writers talking about our experiences with bullies. It's a charity antho to be be published by HarperCollins later this year. I'm very excited to be included in this project.

It is now 2011. I'm the co-sponsor for the Class of 2011 at my school. I've worked with these kids since the end of their freshman year. I'll be weird to see them go.

Happy New Year to everyone. Make this year the best ever. Remember that whatever you want is possible if you just keep working toward it.